seen a lot—believe me—but I threw up twice on the way to get to you, Maggie. I just had this horrible feeling that you were dead and that somehow, by making a sick joke over wanting you, I’d sealed your fate.” Ran hasn’t looked at me for the past few minutes. He still doesn’t. “When I saw you there—hanging from your seatbelt, drenched in blood, but still breathing—you have no idea what that did to me.”
“You didn’t rescue me, Ran.” I tug my fingers out of my glove and stretch my hand over to him, looking for a bare patch of skin so he can feel my reassuring touch on him. There’s a small space on his neck above his jacket collar and I brush my fingers along the skin there. “You are rescuing me. The night of the accident was just the beginning.”
Ran whips his head my direction. He rips off his goggles in one reckless motion. “You don’t blame me?”
“You can’t be serious.” The snow falls steadily around us, landing in small flakes that dust Ran’s eyelashes. He blinks rapidly to shake them off. “You honestly think that you played a part in the accident?”
“No,” Ran continues, rotating his head back and forth. “Obviously I know I didn’t. But how it all happened, it just seemed too significant to be coincidental, you know?”
I pull myself closer to him awkwardly, cutting the sharp edge of the board in a horizontal path in the snow as I slide nearer. “That’s because it wasn’t a coincidence, Ran.” I unclip the bindings from my shoes and leave the board where it lays and drag myself to Ran. I grasp either side of his face and draw it up to mine, forcing him to look at me, forcing him to listen to me. There’s a clarity that’s slipping back into his eyes, casting away the shadow of haze that inhabited them moments ago. “I don’t believe for a second that our meeting was a coincidence. But I also don’t believe you’re at all to blame for how it happened. I just don’t think we can wish for something and have it come true like that—bad or good.”
His half-empty eyes sluggishly lift to mine, like he’s coming out of some stupor or daze. I grip on tighter to his face to shake him out of it completely.
“Maggie. How is it that everything about you is exactly what I’ve been searching for?” Ran brings his frozen lips to mine.
“Because I’m perfect,” I mock, pulling out of our quick kiss.
“Pretty damn near.”
“Oh, and I forgive you,” I add, slinking out of his grip to fit my boots in the bindings again.
“I thought you just said it wasn’t my fault.” Ran wipes his eyes with the back of his glove and secures his goggles back onto his face.
“It’s not,” I confirm. “But I forgive you for being a hypocrite.”
Ran cocks his head to the side the way puppies do when they’re trying to decipher what you’re saying. “How so?”
“You keep telling me that I need to let go of my guilt.” I push up on my knees to lift out of the embankment of snow and steady myself with my arms balanced out on either side. “Yet you’ve obviously been carrying that around for a while. So is that one of those, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ things?”
“I think you should always do as I say, and do as I do.” Ran tosses me an impossibly coy grin that I don’t even know how he’s able to produce because my lips are currently frozen and my tongue is so numb that it feels like a block of ice trapped in my mouth. “And right now, I say we head down this hill, go back to the ‘chalet,’ and search for that hot tub you promised me.”
“I didn’t promise you anything, Ran.”
“Who’s the hypocrite now?”
I teeter on my board and recover my footing. “That wouldn’t make me a hypocrite, that would make me a liar.”
Ran skates closer and brings his mouth near my ear. “Anything else you’re lying to me about?”
I tuck my neck further into my jacket, because his breath should warm where it hits, but it just draws up chills that I can’t afford to have right now. I’ve never been so cold in my life. “I sorta just lied about not believing we get our wishes. Because I really hope I’m about to get mine.”